The Dark Labyrinth Page 3

  For over an hour now he had forgotten what had been haunting him for several days; well, haunting was too strong a word. He sought in his mind for something with a little less value. His round innocent face puckered as he searched the columns of the paper, leaving one-half of his mind to indulge its capacity for fear, and to play with metaphors for death. It was like having a cavity in a tooth—one simply could not keep the tongue away. Death, of course, was a cavity considerably larger and more exciting. After all, he reminded himself, it was not certain that he might die during the next few months. It was merely the opinion of certain medical men—an unreliable faculty at the best. The thought had been, of course, sufficient to dislocate his life to a degree—and yet there need have been no reason. After the first day the expectation of death had assumed a kind of uniform greyness; he referred back to it as he had, when a schoolboy, referred back to the expectation of a thrashing scheduled for the next day. There was an element of pleasure in it too; at times it gave him a sense of isolation and detachment from the rest of the human race, and then he was forced to remind himself that they were also going to die. They, however, were not disturbed by the accent upon a particular time. Yet the idea, which he had confided to nobody, was disturbing. At times he felt almost ashamed of the knowledge—as if it were a disease that should be hidden from his fellows. That was really why he had resigned. It would be somehow awful to die in the Museum. “It might happen quite suddenly,” the doctor had said, adding, “Pop, just like that.” Graecen had been impressed by the phrase. He had found himself saying absently to an assistant curator apropos of a badly-arranged terra-cotta. “It might fall down and break—pop, just like that.”

  And once more logic began to intervene with its clearer assessments. Just look (he had invited himself for the last three mornings running) at Sir Fennystone Crutch. He could not go on for ever. No sane medical man would give him more than six months to live. Toothless, buried in his Sanscrit, forgetting his lunch-hour every day and leaving a jumble of gnawed crusts all over the reading-room floor. He could have no delicacy about the idea of dying at his desk, could he? What would they do if he did? Graecen decided that they would put him on the trolley—already groaning under tomes of Sanscrit—and lay his carpet-bag, skull-cap and slippers beside him. Then they would wheel him away. Would they go through the North Library, and so avoid the main entrance?

  Graecen became exasperated with himself for wasting his time like this … Following up these fatuous chains of possibility. What the devil did it matter which way they wheelec him? He pictured them wheeling the old man’s body across the Graeco-Roman section. Young Stubbs would obviously be the one to wheel him.… He frowned at himself and drew his mind back to the task in hand.

  All this time his eye had been travelling across the sedate columns of the newspaper searching for a review of Syrinx. He was eating buttered toast, his face growing more and more innocent and childish as he felt the butter trickle to his chin. He got out a handkerchief and started absently to dab it. Could he say that life had gained in value from the possibility of its extinction? He knotted his brows in a scowl and cracked the top of the egg. In one way, yes. Everything had been thrown into dark relief—as though he had woken one morning and found the whole world inked in at the edges by a fall of snow. It had informed his critical sense—that was rather an awful phrase. And yet his feelings neither rose nor fell at the idea. Why?

  Even his poetry—had it shown any inclination to strike a deeper note? No, it was just the same. He remembered that his work had been described by a young critic in a little review as “pre-atomic, non-radioactive, non-conducting bilge”. It had annoyed him considerably. “Lord Graecen sticks to the rut of rentier poetry”, was another phrase from the same article. Was he honestly so bad?

  When torpid winter covers

  The city and its lovers,

  The cold finality of snow

  Whitens the signs and clear defines

  The way mortality must go.

  It was all of a range, but he liked it. Of course the demonic element he admired so much in Emily Brontë, that was missing. But was it, as the young men said, cake without currants? It seemed on the contrary rather full of plums. At any rate Yeats had printed one in an anthology; and old Lord Alfred had once invited him to Hove where, he said, he would teach him the elements of the sonnet. It was rather condescending of him, really, but Graecen had thanked him profusely.

  “Ah,” he said, for his eye, travelling slowly down the penultimate page had struck the title “England’s Cricketer-Poet”. There it was to be sure, written with all the overflowing admiration of old Conklin. He noted the usual references to his title, his scholarship, and his cricket. Conklin did not like his poets effeminate. With a certain indignation, however, he read: “It has become increasingly clear that a new Gordon Bottomley is amongst us. Lord Graecen is definitely in the great tradition of Lord Alfred Douglas, Roland Tuft, Canon Alec Smudge, and Loyola Tipstaff, any of whose lines are worth a bookful of today’s harsh clangour, which, to the uninformed, passes for poetry.” Graecen made an irritated gesture in the air and spilt some butter on his tie. “Here!” he said plaintively, addressing Conklin, “you can’t say that.” It was obviously crass. One hated adverse criticism—but could one bear to be damned by this sort of praise? He read on, however, with growing bitterness.

  The bell on the outside door clinked and he saw Hogarth enter, stooping low in his baggy grey trousers, his arms full of books. “Hogarth,” he said delightedly, “Hogarth.” The newcomer lowered his grizzled taurine head and started towards him, with all the caution of a big man who fears that he will overturn something. “Well,” he said, “I was thinking about you—wondering why you hadn’t rung me up.” Graecen was childishly delighted to see his old friend. “Sit down, my dear fellow,” he said. “It’s very nice—dear me—very nice indeed.”

  Hogarth sat down slowly, battling, it seemed, with something like the centrifugal force, and unloaded his books on to the table, placing his stained pork-pie hat on top of them. He regarded Graecen with sardonic affection. His small keen eyes took in Graecen’s appearance: the buttered toast in one hand, the handkerchief in the other, the book open on his knee. “Richard,” he said sternly, “you are reading your own work again.” Graecen blushed like a girl. Hogarth always adopted a tone of savage irony for the sheer pleasure of teasing him.

  To do him justice, Graecen’s character demanded something more barbed than the conventional responses; and Hogarth, whose dominant character was almost the exact antithesis of his, found himself to be almost complementary in feeling and outlook. They got on admirably; fulfilling indeed Hogarth’s theory of psychic union between two essentially polar types. He had named them “dominant” and “recessive”.

  He sat now, regarding his thumbs for a moment, and got his breath. It was obvious that he was a little out of breath. Graecen cherished him with his glances, for he had not seen Hogarth for several weeks. The familiarity of the picture pleased him. Hogarth’s large shoulders were clad in an old tweed coat patched with leather at the elbows. His grey trousers had shrunk in the wash, and their nether ends exposed his thick ankles whose socks hung down about his shoes. His face was like one of those carved Austrian pipe-heads—large bony features which were only kept alive by the small pointed eagerness of his eyes. They were rather fine and changed their colour, the eyes; they were engaged on a perpetual enquiry. When Hogarth laughed they disappeared into small commas like the eyes of pigs. When he opened them very wide, as he did when there was a question to ask, they seemed to become younger, to shine with a beauty and candour of their own.

  “Well,” he said, ordering tea, and starting to charge his great blockish pipe with tobacco, “I’ve been running to get away from Boyd.”

  Graecen registered a rather fussy interest. Boyd was a friend of his. He was wondering how much he should tell Hogarth. “Boyd wants me to do the preface for his book on psychoanalysis and art. He takes both se
riously.” Hogarth sounded gloomy and irritable. “The book is farcical. There is an analysis of Poe’s Raven which would make your hair stand on end. You know the Freudian tie-up between the symbol of the bird and the penis?” Graecen did not, but he blinked and nodded rapidly, moistening his lips with his tongue. “Well, the Raven with its mournful ‘Nevermore’ is a terrible confession of Poe’s impotence.” Graecen said “Dear me” twice, with sympathy. He knew nothing about psycho-analysis, but he could never bring himself to be disrespectful about anything. Hogarth lit up with seven gargantuan puffs. “He has traced a strong interest in masturbation running through Dickens; the choice of names like Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller are only thinly disguised symbols … Dicky, what’s the matter?”

  Graecen felt suddenly unhappy again; he had remembered the sentence. “I’ve resigned from the Antiquities,” he said in a small voice. He had a desire to confide a number of things in Hogarth—among them even old Conklin’s article; but they had all got jammed together at the entrance of his mind and he did not know which he could get out first. His face looked round and ingenuous. His lower lip trembled ever so slightly.

  “You’re run down,” said Hogarth.

  Graecen nodded and handed the paper across the table to his friend, pointing with his finger to the offensive passage in the review; yet before Hogarth had time to read it he added, rather out of breath, “I’m supposed to have only a few months to live.” It sounded absurd. They looked at each other for a second and both laughed, Hogarth gruffly and Graecen in a high boyish register.

  “Of all people, me,” he said, suddenly feeling almost jubilant.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Oh yes, it’s true,” said Graecen eagerly. He was all of a sudden anxious that the trophy should not be taken from him by mere scepticism.

  “Of all people—me. Dicky Graecen.” He had the rather irritating habit of objectivising himself in the third person, as children do. “So what does old Dicky Graecen do?” was a phrase that appeared unfailingly in all his stories of his own doings. He saw himself, as he said it, childishly far-off and remote, as a sort of wayward young man. Young Dicky Graecen. In this case it was young Dicky Graecen who was going to do the dying—he himself, his alter self, was going to live forever; well, if not forever, for at least another fifteen years. By association this brought him back to Syrinx.

  “My new book is out,” he said with a certain pleasant coyness, flushing again. Hogarth looked at him steadily, his eyes still laughing. Whatever happened to Dicky was funny—even the idea of him dogged by a premature death-sentence was funny. One’s compassion was stirred for him through one’s humour. He was holding up the book of poems for inspection.

  Graecen never sent Hogarth his books because the latter professed no interest in poetry or the fine arts. Hogarth however always sent him his own books, however ponderous and smudgy they were. On the flyleaf he always wrote “Dicky—push this round among the nobs. Good for trade.”

  Graecen felt faintly irritated by this suggestion, that he was, at best, a social tout for Hogarth’s clinical work; but the long friendship and affection, dating back to their university days, always won the upper hand, and he swallowed his chagrin.

  “There is no reason”, said Hogarth turning over the book in his paws, “why you shouldn’t die. All of us will have to. And I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to be warned. I like to get myself in order before a change.”

  This was not quite the style of thing Graecen liked. He did not want pity or commiseration, but he did feel.… “Well,” he said, “I’ve locked up the flat, sent Garbett on a holiday, and made my will. I’m as free as the wind. And look.” He flourished the travel-company’s ticket before Hogarth, who was slowly turning the book of poems over and over, as if it were some puzzling potsherd whose function he could not decide.

  “Cefalû,” said Graecen, enunciating clearly but softly the word which seemed to have come out of a W. J. Turner poem.

  “Cefalû,” repeated Hogarth without any emphasis one way or the other. His interest had now moved on from the book to the ticket. The name of the ship was the Europa, “Baird is going to Crete too,” he said. “A patient of mine. You’ll be travelling together, and will see.…”

  “Silenus,” said Graecen with the air of a conjurer bringing off a trick. “I shall tell him everything.”

  “You won’t need to,” said Hogarth sardonically. “He’ll probably tell you, that old Phanariot intriguer. What is all this about the labyrinth? I saw it in the paper.”

  Graecen fished a letter out of his pocket holding up an excited hand to prevent Hogarth saying any more until he should deliver himself of his news, “A letter from Silenus,” he said. “Look.”

  Hogarth saw the familiar vermilion and the little drawing on the letterhead, of a village perched upon the side of a high stone cone. “Read it,” he said. He knew that Graecen loved to read aloud, having a conceit of his voice. “All right, I will.”

  Graecen sat back and put on his story-book voice—the voice reserved for reading of his own work on the radio.

  “The sun”, he read, “comes up every day like the naked flash of a cannon. I am sitting in the garden writing on a fallen block of marble. The roses are doing well and so, as you have heard, is the archaeology. Further to my last, the labyrinth has produced a stone inscription—pre-Minoan? At any rate anothen script I cannot tackle, part hieroglyph. The Museum say they will send for you if I wish? My dear fellow, of course I wish. A summer in Cefalû would do you good. I need company. Bring anyone you wish. But please follow these instructions implicitly: Do not in any way, in print or by statements to the Press, commit yourself to a belief in, or knowledge of, the New Era (we hope) I’ve stumbled on. Got that?” Graecen broke off in confusion and found Hogarth’s steady eye upon him. He wrinkled his brows. “Now I wonder why,” he said plaintively.

  Hogarth admitted a wrinkle to his left cheek and shook out the burnt top of his dottle. “Why not guess?” he said. Graecen looked at him innocently.

  “Dicky,” said Hogarth, “you know what our dear Silenus is. It’s just possible that the New Era is—”

  “Faked?” said Graecen in alarm.

  “Well, it’s a proposition,” said Hogarth easily. “It surely wouldn’t be hard to do.”

  “But the lovely statue,” said Graecen.

  “I should have a good look at it,” his friend advised.

  Graecen looked confused and put the letter back in his pocket. He thought hard.

  “How do you tell the age of a statue anyway?” said Hogarth, “apart from guesswork or typology?”

  Graecen was too busy thinking to answer. He could easily get Firbank and his beastly chemicals to come along and test the stone; “but I don’t want to start any suspicion about Axelos,” he said.

  “Chemicals?” said Hogarth. “Take some along with you when you go.”

  “I will,” said Graecen fervently. “I will.”

  He ate a rejected crust off his plate and seemed lost in thought. The statue was exquisite.

  “Now then,” said Hogarth paying the bill and building a pyramid of books before taking them up. “I want you to meet a young man who is travelling on the Europa with you. He’s waiting in a pub in Shaftesbury Avenue.”

  As usual Graecen had a thousand and one things to do. He took out his little leather notebook. Hogarth must really come to lunch or to dinner; but as usual he was booked right up. Tomorrow he was taking Mrs. Sanguinetti to the new Disney film. There was a dinner at the Savile in the evening. He read breathlessly through his engagements. Hogarth noticed that death hardly intruded upon Graecen’s daily life; it was assumed that he would not die before Saturday, when the Europa was due to sail. He lowered his crest like a bull and dragged his protesting friend to the corner of Tottenham Court Road. When Graecen showed signs of breaking away Hogarth anchored him successfully by giving him some of his books to hold. In this way they made their slow way down to the little pub in w
hich Baird sat, reading a newspaper over his beer.

  Later, as always happened, Graecen found that he was too late to keep the scheduled engagements for the evening, and found himself taking Hogarth out to dinner at the little Spanish restaurant in Old Compton Street, whose pimento-flavoured rice they had enjoyed together for so many years. Baird in his tactful way slipped off and left them together.

  “How is it”, said Graecen when he left, “that that normal-looking young fellow should turn up in your consulting-room, Hogarth?” How indeed? Hogarth considered the question fairly for a moment. The reason for Baird’s journey to Crete was fantastic enough in its way. Cefalû was to be the answer to more than one problem. “By jove,” he said, “I almost wish I was going too, to help him dig up Böcklin.”

  Over dinner he told Graecen the story.

  Portraits

  The portrait of Baird which emerged over the grubby tablecloth in Old Compton Street was of formal proportions; as a history it was uneventful, and only the calm force of Hogarth’s description made it of interest to Graecen. Hogarth was tirelessly interested in his own patients; and he could communicate his interest when he pleased. And yet, thought Graecen so often, while he listened to him, Hogarth was so much more interesting than any of his patients could be. His peculiar reticence, for example, had preserved a wall between them for a third of a century. At the University Hogarth had been a monosyllabic misanthrope, working in his own fashion—chiefly during the day with his blinds drawn and the little electric desk-lamp on. Later he had accepted a fellowship to a German University, where he spent some ten years in talking philosophy and walking in the mountains with his students. He had returned to London with a German wife whom Graecen had never seen. Hogarth lived in Herne Hill, of all places, doing some miserably-paid work as analyst for some Government Department. During this time they met frequently, but Graecen was never invited to visit his home or meet his wife. By accident he found out that Hogarth had a son—but when he asked him about it he received a blank stare. Hogarth neither denied nor corroborated the story. Yet somehow, in some fashion that Graecen could never understand, their friendship remained unimpaired by all this. Later still he was surprised to see Hogarth’s name in the catalogue of an exhibition of oil-paintings at the Leicester Gallery. The paintings were powerfully-executed landscapes, owing nothing to influence or training. Hogarth had dismissed them lightly when he mentioned them. “I did them in Germany during my student days,” he had said, without either interest or self-depreciation. That was all.